Re: something completely different...

[Adam Rose <adam@xxxxxxxx>]

In rely to Rakesh on Thurow:

Sure, "skills, education, knowledge and infrastructure" matter to 
multinationals when
they make their investment decisions. This is basically why most cross border
investment is between one advanced country and another, not from the metropolis
to the colonies, as it used to be.

But so do old fashioned things like the size of the market, the level of 
government
bribes ( sorry, subsidies ) and overall wage costs.

And there is, and has always been, a contradiction between the real world, where
the state is very important, and the strange world inhabited by free market
theorists. Some of these people are starting to realise this - although I think
that has a lot to do with events like the recent French events and the GM
strike. They realise that they all out attack ideology of the Thatcher + Reagan
years doesn't quite suite the present state of the class struggle, just as they
realised that the corporatist / Keynesian model no longer suited them in the 
late
70's and early 80's

But really, I wonder when these people are going to look at the real world for
a change :

"microelectronics, biotechnology, the new material science industries,
telecommunications, civilian aircraft manufacturing, machine tools and
robots, and computers (hardware and software)"

The first point about these industries is that the ability to compete in
them is not simply a matter of brain power but of mobilising the massive
amounts of capital neccessary to produce these things at a competitive
price, if at all. [ eg it took 1/4 of the GDR's GDP year after year to
produce an inferior Personnal Computer, which got cast into the
dustbin of history along with the state which spawned it ].

It is gradually becoming the case that even multinational
companies with GDP's greater than that of many states are too small to
do it. These industries are extreme examples of the concentration of capital,
the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and the relations of
production acting as fetters on the means of production.


The second point is that while we have ever increasing lumps of capital
on the one hand, we have an ever more proletarianised work force on
the other. How many bank managers in their little offices have to be
replaced by data input clerks in huge offices, how many genetically
engineered tomatoes have to be put on the same rack in how big
a superstore, just how big do the "hub" airports  have to become,
before these people understand this ?

Adam.



Adam Rose
SWP
Manchester
UK


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